OPINION: Fate: The Winx Saga is a disappointing live-action adaptation

For someone who watched Winx Club growing up, I was excited when I heard the news of Netflix creating a whole series dedicated to it. However, when they released the trailer for Fate: The Winx Saga, it obviously fell flat for a number of reasons. The original material helped teach young audiences valuable lessons while still being airy and uplifting. Sure, everyone who has ever loved the Winx Club is probably old. But, that doesn’t mean older audiences wouldn’t like to see that kind of thing! Fate tried to make it “relatable” and it turned out to be cringe-worthy, annoying, and most of the time, unnecessary.

OPINION: Fate: The Winx Saga is a disappointing live-action adaptation

Whitewashing characters.

The main reason has to do with the whitewashing of the main characters. This actually hurt. I’ve always seen myself as Flora and once I saw the trailer, she turned out to be a white woman. Where’s my brown-skinned fave? Musa isn’t even Asian in the series. And, Tecna… is just gone! Creator Iginio Straffi himself created these characters so that “teenagers from all over the world could identify themselves with the characters they think they are most like.” How can we even do that if almost the whole cast is white? Ugh. Aside from the lack of representation, Fate: The Winx Saga is a disappointing live-action adaptation and I have so many reasons why.

The original series revolved around a group of diverse and fashionable friends who have different kinds of interesting powers: Bloom, Stella, Flora, Musa, Layla, and Tecna. Together, these girls make up the Winx Club. However, Netflix didn’t give us that – they gave us everything but that. We grew up thinking about how fashionable they are, how good their friendship is, and how badass it is to see a group of women saving an entire fictional universe. If Netflix is trying to ignite nostalgia, this isn’t the way to do it.

The Winx Club consists of teenage fairies, not thirty-year-old witches.

These protagonists are students in a magic school – students! And yet, they look like their teachers. I am forever going to be mad at the casting. Because they didn’t even try! The girls are teenage fairies, not thirty-year-old witches. The girls are supposed to be fashionable, quirky, weird, and should at least look like an adolescent. They all look like they are too old to even go to school. The original material, Winx Club, paved the way for Y2K fashion along with another teenage-centric cartoon, Totally Spies.

The characters would wear bold and ornamental compositions. Think about the classic staples from your wardrobe when you were young and they would wear those. With Y2K fashion making a comeback, all those things did, too. Items like butterfly hair clips, pink gummy sandals, pleated skirts, button-up cardigans, and tie-front shirts among others are all the rage now. Netflix could have used this viral fashion trend to their advantage and dressed the cast up with it.

The girls are supposed to be friends!

The friendship in this series feels obligatory. Sure, there are occasional touching scenes. But, even then, it looks like they barely tolerate each other. The teasing doesn’t come off as playful banter as it should between friends. Instead, it sounds catty and mean-spirited. Aside from that, a weird love triangle between Stella, Bloom, and Sky exists. If these creators only watched the original material, they would know that Stella and Bloom will never fight over anything, let alone a sword-wielding guy no matter how hot he may be.

Poor character development.

This ties into the show for trying hard to be relatable. When first being introduced to the characters, I found myself disliking a few of them, finding them a bit of a nuisance. Sure, they’re angsty teenagers (even though they don’t look like it) with a lot of baggage, the poor character development is really quite disappointing. Bloom’s attitude, Riven’s hot-head character, Terra’s inability to really connect, and of course, Aisha who one minute is a good friend but also turns out to be slightly selfish. The lack of depth and development worked against the show and quite honestly, it’s obvious.